Tuesday, October 18, 2005

The First Annual Ziva Kunda Memorial Lecture was held a few weeks ago (September 26) at the University of Waterloo, where Ziva spent the last several years of her career before her death in 2004 (earlier note on her passing). Fittingly, the inaugural speaker in this lecture series was Dick Nisbett, Ziva's advisor during her graduate training at the University of Michigan in the 1980s.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Social Psychologists Who Spent Time at Both Michigan and Buffalo

Time for another "overlap" analysis, this time looking at social psychologists (and others in related fields) having affiliations with both the University of Michigan and the University at Buffalo. The latter was known previously as the University of Buffalo, when it was a private institution before joining the State University of New York (SUNY) system, but either way the school has long been referred to by local residents as "UB" (click here for the school's history). I have previously done Michigan-UCLA (June 2004), Michigan-Stanford (February 2005), and Michigan-Ohio State (May 2005) listings.

Lora Park, now a new faculty member at Buffalo after completing her Ph.D. at UM, deserves co-authorship on this entry. When, at some point early in 2005, I put out a request for suggestions for future overlap lists, Lora e-mailed me with a list of Buffalo-Michigan people and mentioned that she, herself, would be joining the UB faculty. During my visit to Ann Arbor this past July, I was able to meet Lora in person.

Buffalo has special importance for me, for a couple of reasons. First, I was based at the Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) near downtown Buffalo from 1991-1997 and also taught a couple of classes at UB in 1995 and '96. In fact, in one of the great "small world" instances in my life, shortly after I arrived at RIA, I learned that the institute's librarian, Ann Sawusch, was the daughter of former Michigan personality psychology professor John (Jack) Atkinson. I have not included visiting professors and lecturers in my previous cross-school listings, and I shall not include myself in the list below; still, I wanted to mention my connection to Buffalo.

Second, two distinguished (and now deceased) figures in the history of social psychology, Daniel Katz and Hal Gerard, each had ties to both Michigan and Buffalo. Katz (who got a degree at Buffalo in 1925 [!] before going to Syracuse for his doctoral work) spent the bulk of his career at Michigan, whereas Gerard spent the bulk of his career at UCLA (where I did some research with him during my undergraduate years).

Here is the list (updated October 19) :

Buffalo undergraduate-UM faculty member

Daniel Katz

UM undergraduate-Buffalo faculty member

Jim Pomerantz (cognitive, now at Rice University)
Jim Sawusch (cognitive)

Graduate school at both Buffalo and UM

Diane Quinn
Connie Wolfe

Buffalo graduate student and UM post-doc

Riia Luhtanen

UM graduate student-Buffalo faculty member

Irving Biederman (neuroscience, now at U. of Southern Calif.)
Walter Cohen (exper./cog., UB faculty member 1948-1974)
Hal Gerard (deceased)
Jack Meacham
Lora Park
Joel Raynor
Egan Ringwall (clinical, UB faculty member 1949-1977)
Phil Shaver (now at University of California, Davis)
Steve Spencer (now at University of Waterloo)

UM post doc-Buffalo faculty member

Sandra Murray

Faculty member at both Buffalo and UM

Jenny Crocker (lab page)
C. Jim Smith (behavioral neuroscience, at UM 1953-1961 and at UB 1961-1999)

Thanks to Jack Meacham for supplying names of some earlier Buffalo-Michigan overlappers.